Hi everyone!

This post will probably be the first of many blog posts for my In-Depth project. But what is my In-Depth project going to be about I pretend you ask for the sake of transitioning?

For my In-Depth project, I will be learning the Arabic language.

I’ve always wanted to learn another language for the longest time. The last time I learned a language was when I learned to speak, and those were Mandarin and English. I have always wanted to experience learning another language as the languages you learn when you learn to speak come more naturally from mimicking others around you, while learning a language later on in life means you actually have to teach yourself. Furthermore, the ability to learn languages is said to greatly diminish after a certain point, so I’ve always felt an urgency to achieve this goal unlike any other goal I want to achieve.

In the past few years, I’ve also been diving down an endless hole about linguistics. For those of you unfamiliar with linguistics, it is the study of languages essentially, and includes, but not limited to:
Phonology, the sounds of a language; Grammar, the rules of a language; Morphology, the changes to a language over time. For these two reasons, I’ve always wanted to learn a third language. I’ve actually tried in the past, twice, but both times I gave up after two days. With the In-Depth project, however, I have more of an incentive to learn.

But why Arabic specifically? Why didn’t I choose to learn Yakut, Guarani, or any other language for that matter? I chose to learn Arabic for three reasons: use, complexity, and novelty. First, use. Arabic is one of the most spoken languages, making it extremely useful, as the more people you can communicate with, the more useful a language becomes. Next, complexity. While it depends on who you ask, Arabic is always consistently ranked as one of the hardest languages to learn for an English speaker, mostly due to their lack of similarities, but also from having difficult features to learn. Finally, novelty. Arabic is very different from English and Mandarin. It is part of a different language family, written in a different script, and generally sounds different from the languages I speak. Thus, those are my reasons for choosing to learn Arabic.

So how will the process look?

I will first start with writing and phonology. After that, I will jump between vocabulary and grammar, progressing from basic to more advanced vocabulary and grammar. Near the end, I will learn about poetry, calligraphy, and dialects of Arabic. To demonstrate my learning, I will be making three short projects. The first project is to record a conversation in Arabic to test my ability to speak and listen. At the end of the conversation, there will be a discussion on how well we understood each other. For the second project, I will be writing a poem in a calligraphy style. Not only will this demonstrate my ability to read and write, but also understanding of the more cultural aspects of the language. My final project will be to create a presentation on what I have learned as a whole. This presentation will include my first and second projects, as well as a presentation within the presentation on a random topic to further demonstrate my learning. Along the way, I will be demonstrating my learning through logs of my learning in Arabic. In these logs, I will list what I have learned since the last log, as well as a short portion on something that has happened in my life since the last log.

That has been my Introductory Blog Post for my In-Depth Project. Thank you for taking the time to read it.

Cheers,
Tyler